Читать книгу Alice’s Secret: A gripping story of love, loss and a historical mystery finally revealed - Lynne Francis - Страница 17

‘Bogbean and myrtle. Pulmonaria,’ recited Alys to herself as she meandered down the path to the bathing pool. It was her favourite path, the one with the stone she called the fairy slide, where the granite had been worn so smooth by the passage of feet that it was scooped in the centre, with raised sides. It undulated down the hillside, reminding her of the long slide at a theme park somewhere in Cornwall that she’d been to many years before, as a child.

She knew that she was mixing up common and Latin names for plants, but the sound of the words pleased her, making their own kind of rhythm to accompany her as she went along the path. Her aunt had been teaching her, surprised by her lack of knowledge of anything other than the most basic garden flowers. Alys made a point of taking photos of flowers on her phone when she was out and about, then taking them back to Moira so they could check them out against the hand-drawn illustrations in Moira’s battered copy of The Concise British Flora in Colour.

The pool was in sight below, glinting invitingly through the trees on this late-spring morning. The water would be freezing, fresh off the moors. She shivered in anticipation. It should be just the right depth at the moment. Any deeper, and she would start imagining moorland monsters lurking down there, their presence protected by the locals who told not a soul about them. Alys smiled to herself. First fairies and now monsters. Her imagination was definitely running away with her. There was something about this area, this valley, though. It felt as though it held so much history, so many secrets.

She shivered again, and shrugged her shoulders in an attempt to break free of the spell it had cast over her. It was a beautiful day, the sort that May offers to seduce you into thinking that summer has truly arrived. The sun was high, the sky all but cloudless and a bright clear blue that stretched upwards into infinity.

Alys crossed the bridge over the stream and stretched out on her back on the grassy bank a little way from the pool. She’d discovered it two or three weeks ago, on one of her walks along the river bank. It was located a little further than she had travelled during her previous explorations, but she soon realised that it could also be reached via the path down the hillside, although this route was less appealing for the journey home when it seemed unaccountably steeper. The pool was a perfect natural formation: a basin formed by rocks, before the water funnelled away and tumbled over stones downstream to Nortonstall, a couple of miles away. The pool always seemed to be calm and still, the water dark and peaceful, and it had suggested itself as the ideal spot for a swim to Alys one day when she realised that the only thing she missed about her trips to the gym back in London was the chance to go swimming. Hauling around sacks of flour, baking, carrying trays of dirty crockery and sweeping the café floor gave her enough of a workout, she reasoned. Swimming would offer some of that nice, gentle relaxation that Moira was recommending.

She gazed up at the sky, watching swifts dart across her vision on high, then swooping low, scooping up insects and shrieking to each other with their high-pitched calls. She was looking forward to the shock of plunging into the pool’s icy water, but she wanted to lie there a while first, warming herself in the sun. Bees buzzed busily around the gorse bushes that were scattered around the edge of the grass and on the hillside, which stretched up behind her. Moira had told her about gorse’s coconut scent, and she hadn’t believed her at first. But now she could smell it quite clearly, wafting over her as she lay there, relaxing into the ground and soaking up wellbeing in every fibre of her body.